The King and the Princess
by aecul
Summary: An allegory for the parable of the prodigal son.


I got a bit of this idea from a similar (but much shorter) story that I heard at a conference a few years ago. To that story I added more of the Prodigal Son idea (my favorite parable). So, this was meant to be an allegory, and the princess is supposed to represent all God's children.

I hope you like it. This is my first shot at an allegory-type story, so reviews would be great. :)

God bless you all!

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_The King and the Princess_

Once upon a time, far away in a kingdom by the sea, there lived a great king. He was wise and kind and ruled his country well, beloved by his subjects.

Late one night, as heavy spring rain pounded the ground outside, and sharp wind tossed the trees, the king sat in his throne room with a group of councilors. As the men spoke together, there began a soft, frantic thumping on the wooden door. The king calmly stood from his throne and crossed to open the door, finding on the doorstep a little girl, hardly six years old, wrapped in sodden rags and soaked to the skin. Her face was filthy, her hair a rat's nest, her feet tracking mud as the king bid her come inside the palace.

The child stared up in bewilderment at her grand surroundings, so unlike the small village she had come from. The king asked his councilors to pardon him a moment and led the girl past walls hung with tapestries lit by lamps from the ceiling and torches from the walls, over the flagstone floors to another door, which led into a quiet room, safe from the wild storm outside.

The girl dug her bare toes into the thick raspberry carpet burying the floor, then walked across the room to the beautiful canopy bed on the other side. She crawled onto it and lay on her back on the sheets, oblivious to the mess she was staining them with. The king watched her, smiling, until she sat up. "This is the room I always dreamed of," she told him, eyes darting over the framed pictures decorating the walls and the bookshelves and elaborate white bureau below them.

The king's eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled again. "I know, sweetheart. I have been waiting for you for quite some time."

"Have you?" the girl asked, surprised. "I only just ran away from the village today. I didna plan on coming here, but I was lost, and I saw the lights in the windows from miles off…"

"I put the lights there for you," the king said, his voice deep and peaceful. It made her feel warm to her toes. "To guide you on your way."

The little girl stared up at the king's face, and knew that she had found someone who loved her, someone she could trust to take good care of her. She sat up, dangling her feet over the edge of the bed.

The king knelt before her and took her small hand in his big, rough one. He looked straight into her eyes. "Would you like to stay here and be my princess?"

The girl gazed back. "Yes, sir. I would like that very much."

So she did.

The little girl was raised as a princess from that day onward. Some parts of it were fun- she got to go to fancy dinners and dances afterward that lasted far into the night, music drifting out across the patios over the palace lawns and courtyards. Other parts were not so much fun, like having to stay cooped up inside many days, learning dull lessons that the princess was sure she would never use.

The king was like a father to her. He was insistent that she work diligently at her studies. He knew how to make her laugh and which punishments were effective with her. He always knew exactly when to be gentle and when to be harsh; he never let a good deed go unrewarded or disobedience unpunished.

It was true, they did not always get along. The princess was stubborn and occasionally rebellious, taking her own decisions as the best ones and refusing to listen to the king.

He had only one rule set for her: Do not leave the palace walls. She asked him why, and he told her that out there was not the place for a princess. When she was older, and had gained more wisdom, she could leave the palace and visit the cities beyond. But until then, she must stay with the king in the palace.

The princess longed for adventure. She read books filled with bright paintings of lands far away, of deserts and bounding rivers and quiet forests. She would run her fingers over the delicate pages, imagining herself into the pictures. Her favorite stories were ones involving great cities, crowded with multitudes of people of every kind. There were houses stacked on top of each other, with laundry hung out to dry over the streets on long ropes, strung between windows. There were open-air markets, crammed with stalls offering things brought from distant lands to sell…the princess sighed with delight. How she would love to live in the city! Sometimes, when she was angry with the king, she sat moodily on her balcony overlooking the courtyards and the far-off mountains, thinking perhaps she ought to have stayed in the village where she was born. She had quite forgotten why she had left in the first place, and saw no reason for it now.

She spent many long years cooped up in the palace, wishing for excitement that she doubted would ever find her there. She ignored the king's invitations to come see him, and talk with him; and she discovered that the royal banquets she had always loved had begun to seem tedious. She avoided them after that, begging that she felt ill, and shut herself up in her room.

Another thing the princess disliked about her life in the palace was that the king allowed no suitors to come see her. She met some sons of ambassadors, and young dukes and marquises, but most of them had been engaged since they were very little. The princess watched all her friends get married at lavish weddings and have beautiful, curly-haired babies, and she hoped desperately for these things for herself.

She at last approached the king on the subject. "Your majesty," she said, "I'm not happy here with you. Why won't you let me have the chances everyone else does? Why am I different?"

The king replied, "My princess, you are different because I chose you for my own. You don't need to follow the things of the world; they will only cause you pain. I am asking you to stay here for now, because I am teaching you many lessons you don't understand yet. But you _will_ understand them, and you will see why I raised you as I did. Look at me."

The princess lifted her gaze to his, and all of a sudden felt very small and shallow. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

"I know. But from now on, I ask you to trust me. I will provide everything you need, when it is the right time."

"But…" she hesitated. "What if I don't always trust you?"

He smiled sadly. "It's up to you. I won't stop you from making the decisions you feel are right. Whatever happens, though, know that I will _always_ be here for you. I promise."

She turned away, but she let him give her a hug before he retreated from the throne room, leaving her alone to think about what he had said.

The princess decided to forget about her worries for the time being, and she did a good job of it. She stowed her story books in the back of her closet, and threw herself into things like learning to play the piano and write in calligraphy. She would occasionally sit out on a balcony, watching the lights wink in the city outside the palace gates, but when her vision began to blur with tears, she remembered the king's face as he promised he would never abandon her, and her heart didn't ache quite so much. For four years she worked hard at doing what the king asked of her: following his guidance and teaching.

But no matter how strong your resolve, four years is a long time, and when the princess was eighteen she was tired of waiting for the king's "right time". She watched people travel to and from the palace, and talk of the things outside, while she had to stay _in_side and continue her studies. It was dull and irritating and the princess was very, very sick of everything.

One day, wandering in the gardens, the princess came upon the stables. She had never visited them before, and was curious, so she went inside and breathed in the unfamiliar smells of hay and sweaty horses and dusty oat feed. She loved the great peaceful horses, and came again to the stables the next day and the next. She met one of the stable boys, a young man a few years older than she, who taught her to feed the horses sugar cubes, and to ride on a pony. After a few weeks, the princess began to notice the stable boy's sharp dark eyes, and the way he stood with his shoulders straight, and the way his voice was strong and captivating. He showed her how he played pranks on the other stable hands, and she laughed at his daring. He introduced her to the other palace servants, in the process explaining to her how to snatch food from the kitchens when the cook wasn't looking, and how to get the court juggler to do his best tricks that he usually saved for special occasions. The stable boy and the princess went on picnics in the courtyards and slowly, she found herself falling for him, and delighting in the way he began to pay extra-special attention to her, too.

The stable boy was the one who brought the princess outside the palace gates (secretly, of course) for the first time since she was six, taking her to go to a carnival in the city. The princess was ecstatic, and took in everything with wide eyes, heart pounding with delight. This was how things were supposed to be! She was having the time of her life. When an image of the king's face in her mind threatened to ruin her pleasure, she forced it away and after a while her conscience let up on her a bit.

She found some unexpected things about the outside world frightened her. She didn't like the drunken men who wandered the streets after dark, or the vendors who cheated her out of her money at the carnival. They twisted her stomach into a knot and she thought of the king back in her safe, comfortable palace. He was big enough to chase all her worries away…but she couldn't tell him about them. He would be very disappointed in her.

She confided in her stable boy instead. He was scornful. "Why do you care what the king thinks?" he asked her. "You're a grown-up woman now. He shouldn't be able to tell you what to do. Besides, why d'you need him when you've got me?" He gave her a crooked smile after this, completely putting her defenses for the king out of her head. When she thought about it again later, she decided that the stable boy was right. _She_ was in charge of her life now, not the king.

So, she ran away from home, for the second time in her life. She left with the stable boy one day, and didn't return. She knew exactly how she was breaking the king's heart, but she shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind.

The stable boy let her live with him in his crummy little apartment on the cheap side of the city. It was nothing like her lovely room at the palace, but she cleaned it up as best she could and told herself it was home now. After all, she had nowhere else to go.

The princess lived like the other city girls. She went out and gossiped in the marketplace, and knit mittens for the stable boy when it got cold out, and ran next door to hide out for a few hours when he came home drunk. She learned to live on just a few coins a month. It wasn't quite what she had imagined, but she was all right with it. It was _her_ life, no one else's, and_ she_ was the one making choices for herself. So it wasn't that bad.

The princess missed her noble friends. She missed her cozy bedroom. She missed being warm on cold nights, and cool on hot nights. She missed the peace and quiet of the palace gardens on summer evenings. But, she reminded herself, they had been replaced with new things. In the city, she loved the streets filled with chattering people. She loved the cobblestones and the tiny apartment balconies. She loved her stable boy and was mostly happy with him. She did not love the city quite as much as she loved the palace, her home, but there was no way she could go back, so she made do.

The princess no longer felt much like a princess. Her hair grew down past her waist, and it was tangled and greasy a lot of the time. The stable boy told her she looked nicer with make-up on, but the only make-up she could afford was of bad quality and made her face blotchy, so she had to buy _more_ to cover _that_ up. She wore clothes much like the ones she had shown up at the palace in twelve years before, though she did not know it. She was often ashamed to leave her apartment because of how she looked. She had never felt that way with the king; he loved her no matter what. But people in the city were different.

The final and worst ordeal came when the princess was nineteen years old. After hiding the symptoms for nine whole months, the princess gave birth to a baby boy. She had fought the morning sickness; she had eaten seconds and thirds every night to cover up her sudden weight gain; she had pretended she was entirely fine, but to no avail. The baby still came, and, as she had felt deep in the pit of her stomach all those months, the stable boy was repulsed. "We can't take care of a kid!" he shouted. The princess by this time had lost her generally composed nature, and she screamed back, "He's _my_ baby! I won't let you take him away!"

What actually happened was worse. The next morning, when she woke from the single hour of sleep she got that night, the stable boy had cleared out, along with all their money. He had even sold their apartment.

Harried and sick with fear for what she would do now, the princess begged her neighbors for help. She promised that once she got a job she would pay them back, but they refused, on the grounds that they did not have enough money or food for themselves, much less a single mother outside their families.

Only one old woman was even willing to talk to the princess. She gave her watered-down tea (the regular stuff was expensive), and took a turn rocking the baby. The princess sat at the edge of a worn armchair, while the woman paced back and forth before the window across the room. "Have you any family you can go to, dear?" she asked gently. The princess bit her lip. "No, I haven't."

"Anyone at all? Old friends?"

"Well…"

"Child, you can't do this on your own, I know that for sure. You need someone to take care of you."

"But I betrayed him! He'll never forgive me." Releasing her pent-up emotion the princess burst into tears.

The old woman's heart throbbed for the lonely girl. "Who, honey?"

"The…the king," the princess stammered.

"The king, eh? Love, you ought to go back to him. I have a feeling he'll be waiting for you with open arms. Our king is a good one, he is."

The princess mulled over the woman's advice for two days, and then, hungry and exhausted, she set out for the palace. If the king would not accept her as his princess any longer, at least she could offer her services to him, in hopes of working for food and a roof over her head.

As she approached the palace, and could see its familiar towers rising high above the hills, her grip tightened on her baby's carriage handle, and she felt tears pressing at the corners of her eyes. What could she say to the king? What right did she have to return to him? Of course he had promised he wouldn't abandon her, but that was before _she_ had abandoned _him_. And for what? The filthy, backstabbing city.

The princess could see the gates of the palace in the distance. Her pace slowed inadvertently, avoiding the inevitable for as long as possible. In her mind played the face of the king, angry and sad. Her stomach twisted.

Then, at the gates, a figure appeared, small at first, then quickly bigger. Running towards her. The princess was not sure what to think. She stopped altogether and stared uncomprehendingly at the person hastening in her direction. Who…? Why…?

It was the king. Was there any thought otherwise? He threw his strong, comforting arms around her and held her tightly against him. "My daughter," he whispered. "My princess."

The princess was speechless. She put her arms hesitantly around him too, and lost all sense of worry in his loving embrace. She was home.

When the king let her go, she looked up into his face and saw that it was tearstained. He wore the happiest smile she had ever seen, and he rubbed her own tears from her cheeks. "I love you," he said, his smile dropping to absolute seriousness. "I never gave up hoping you would return to me."

She choked back a sob.

"Despite all that you have done, I want you to come home again as my princess. Did I not say I would never abandon you? You are mine, forever."

The princess buried her face in his shoulder again. "I'm so, so, so sorry. How can I ever repay you?"

"There is no need," the king told her. "All is forgiven. And now, I think, you have learned the hard way lessons I was trying to teach you all the time. There is someone at the palace waiting to meet you."

"Who?"

"My dear, the prince I picked out just for you the day you were born. He has promised to love you all his days, even in tough times, make-up or no." His eyes crinkled. "I have plans for you and him and your children that will far exceed your greatest expectations. Real adventures. You have only to follow me."

The princess managed a smile, and found her heart that had been so downtrodden only minutes before was now bursting with joy. "I…I want to…"

"Will you accept my invitation? Will you return with me to the palace as princess?"

She did not hesitate, but took his hand. "Yes, sir. I would like that very much."

So she did.

_Finis _


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